For A Good Time On The Intertubes Today (And Forever): Annalee Newitz Takes Survival To Extremes

Very short notice this time, folks, but once again, I’m doing the funny intertube-radio thingee. Today’s broad/podcast brings io9 founding editor Annalee Newitz in to talk about her book Scatter, Adapt, And Remember.*

The focus of our chat — death, destruction, and the possibility of slipping the noose. Annalee’s book looks at what it will take for the human species to survive another million years — avoiding the threat of mass extinction along the way. Her book really does two things. For one, it provides a very good short introduction to the science of mass extinction, what we know and how we’ve figured out about the five times in Earth’s history that ~75% or more of all species on the planet went caput. Then in the second half, Annalee examines the threats humankind have already confronted, looks at what that history tells us about current dangers, and writes about the ways we can now think about near and long term escapes from the worst outcomes. It’s a combination (as you’d expect from the mind behind the “We Come From The Future” brigade over at io9) of bravura science writing — imaginative and rigorously grounded accounts of current inquiry — and plausible, exciting speculation.

To emphasize: this isn’t a work of speculative writing, fiction or non-fiction. It’s an argument that includes speculation, given its weight through the third element of Annalee’s title: “Remember.” There’s a beautiful section in the middle of the book in which Annalee discusses the science fiction of Octavia Butler. There, she grapples with the nub of the book. Whatever actual path(s) we take, should descendents of 21st century humans persist for geologically noticeable swathes of time, they will do so as one or many species increasingly divergent from our own. What will be human about them, Annalee argues, will turn on the power and persistence of memory. That sounds exactly right to me.

Come join us for the chat. Should be fun…and more than that too, I hope.

*You can take up that title’s Oxford comma-hood in the comments, if you’re that kind of person. Me, I’m an agnostic.

One Comment on “For A Good Time On The Intertubes Today (And Forever): Annalee Newitz Takes Survival To Extremes”

Re: “Whatever actual path(s) we take, should descendents of 21st century humans persist for geologically noticeable swathes of time, they will do so as one or many species increasingly divergent from our own.”

That sounds very unlikely given the human urge to have sex with just about anyone or anything willing to have sex back. If the species are going to diverge, there has to be some mechanism of isolation. I suppose if the continents drift far enough apart and we forget how to sail ships for a long enough time, though a mere 15,000 years, we know, is not long enough. Perhaps it would be socially enforced isolation, though I rather doubt this will work given our history of social isolation and interbreeding.

Maybe she was channeling Haldane and his ideas about planetary colonization with humans on Jupiter becoming stocky and thick boned for the high gravity and the humans of Venus developing heat shedding organs. It’s nonsense today, but we knew a lot less about the planets 100 years ago. He did have one great chilling line about the later colonists being used for experimental purposes.